Felice said she’d only seen her father cry once.\u00c2\u00a0 In the funeral home, in front of her grandfather’s casket.<\/p>\n
We spent the afternoon at the Plant.\u00c2\u00a0 The multiplex on the site where they used to make Camaros.\u00c2\u00a0 We saw "Cars".<\/p>\n
Maybe I went because it’s the Apple religion, but the sheer creativity was awe-inspiring.\u00c2\u00a0 The fact that John Lasseter and his team built this artwork from scratch, their only goal being to wow those who saw it.\u00c2\u00a0 The subtleties made you ooh and ahh.\u00c2\u00a0 Made you want to go home and create something out of thin air, to relish the process of employing one’s powers, concocting something to enrapture others, with no limits holding you back.<\/p>\n
After the movie ended, we stopped at Whole Foods to buy steaks to barbecue on Felice’s new grill.\u00c2\u00a0 And it was after consuming said beef, in the air-conditioned comfort of Felice’s dining room, that Felice made the above pronouncement.<\/p>\n
And while she was reminiscing about praying the dachsund her father ran over in the driveway wouldn’t die, I suddenly thought of Chunky Monkey.\u00c2\u00a0 A container of which she’d purchased upon my rave.\u00c2\u00a0 Did she still have it?<\/p>\n
Felice smiled and said yes.<\/p>\n
I went into the kitchen and retrieved it.<\/p>\n
Ben & Jerry no longer own their company.\u00c2\u00a0 Chalk it up to the vagaries of distribution.\u00c2\u00a0 But for a while there, their operation was the Apple Computer of its day.\u00c2\u00a0 You believed in it.<\/p>\n
And they didn’t just offer chocolate and vanilla.\u00c2\u00a0 They concocted flavors inconceivable to the layman.\u00c2\u00a0 Like Cherry Garcia and Phish Food.\u00c2\u00a0 And Chunky Monkey.<\/p>\n
Chunky Monkey is simpler than most of their flavors.\u00c2\u00a0 But no one ever came up with the idea before.<\/p>\n
It’s got flakes of chocolate.\u00c2\u00a0 Like someone was whittling a bar of Ghiradelli.\u00c2\u00a0 And walnuts, not broken bits, but entire halves.\u00c2\u00a0 And they’re swirled within banana ice cream.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is not pungently sweet, but akin to the finest vanilla, with just a hint of the taste of the yellow fruit.<\/p>\n
I went to the drawer to retrieve spoons, but rather than return to the dining room I stopped at the microwave.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d been telling Felicee about the bouquet, how you had to serve Ben & Jerry’s soft.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 And if you didn’t have time to let it soften, you just gave it a whirl in the microwave.<\/p>\n
How many seconds did it take again?\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t want to turn the ice cream into soup.<\/p>\n
Figuring half a minute was too little and 45 seconds too much, I settled on 35.\u00c2\u00a0 And as I stood there, as the container rotated on the glass under the light, as Felice expressed anxiety from the other room, it became obvious, I was being my father.<\/p>\n
Oh, my father loved ice cream.\u00c2\u00a0 And brought half gallons home from Friendly’s on a regular basis.<\/p>\n
But by time the gourmet brands had hit the scene, we were long gone from the house.\u00c2\u00a0 But when we returned from our sojourns, sometimes after a\u00c2\u00a0 year, it would be a ritual.\u00c2\u00a0 Every night my father would stand in front of the microwave softening the pints he retrieved from the freezer.\u00c2\u00a0 And after taking a spoonful, making sure the consistency was just right, he’d walk around the house, spooning and eating.<\/p>\n
I returned to the dining room table.\u00c2\u00a0 Felice dipped her utensil in.\u00c2\u00a0 And when that smile crossed her face, I felt like Morris once again, thrilled that I’d engendered enjoyment in another.<\/p>\n
Felice’s father is gone now.\u00c2\u00a0 But so many of his characteristics live on in her.<\/p>\n
I had no idea how many of my dad’s traits still live on in me.<\/p>\n
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Felice said she’d only seen her father cry once.\u00c2\u00a0 In the funeral home, in front of her grandfather’s casket. We spent the afternoon at the Plant.\u00c2\u00a0 The multiplex on the site where they used to make Camaros.\u00c2\u00a0 We saw "Cars". Maybe I went because it’s the Apple religion, but the sheer creativity was awe-inspiring.\u00c2\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-7K","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}